Wet hot American holiday

In case you haven't noticed the copious amounts of patriotism building up in the arteries of this great nation, today is the Fourth of July.

Today is the day that we celebrate the fact that 300 or so years ago (we'll look that up later), our forefathers got together to read aloud from Thomas Jefferson's latest declaration (the colonial-era equivalent of a Tweet) about how the British really needed to, quote, "check themselves before they wreck themselves."

The British were unable to check themselves due to royal protocol, and revolution was soon under way. Or underway. We forget.

Casting the yoke of oppression off their shoulders (which wasn't easy on account of the powdered wigs), the founding fathers, (George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Sam Adams Boston Lager, Gomez Addams, John "not an Adams" Hancock) fought off hordes of British troops using only their wits and good old American know-how. Once someone suggested they start using guns, the tide of battle turned. Before too long, despite Paul Revere's best attempts to warn them, the British were forced to give up the colonies.

The founding fathers went on to enjoy long careers lending their names to elementary schools and posing for mountain sculptures, statues and currency, and the British never returned, except for when they totally did and burned Washington to the ground. The city, we mean.

So as we go forth into this vast purple-mountained realm of amazement we call America in celebration of the Fourth of July, cluttering the landscape with the fingers we lose while attempting to re-light Black Cats, let us take a moment to thank the brave men who made all this possible. Namely, my former neighbor Mr. Boyles, who single-handedly kept the fireworks industry solvent for the years 1990-1997.

Mr. Boyles was what every kid needs in their neighborhood: a wealthy eccentric pyromanic who wasn't afraid to drive across the border into Indiana to purchase high-quality explosives for the purposes of reducing the neighborhood to a soot-stained pockmark. I'm pretty sure every neighborhood had one.

Every July Fourth, while the resident of Belisle Court turned out to watch the carnage, Mr. Boyles would strut out from his house carrying two armloads of Saturn Rockets, Tiger Bombs, Whistle Zippers, Sky Rippers, Cloud Ticklers and the dreaded Flying Nurple. Incidentally, these are all amazing names for wrestling moves.

While the adults placed bets on whose mailbox was going to be the first to go, and us kids ignited snap-poppers on each others' ears, Mr. Boyles would present each purchase with great aplomb, firing them haphazardly across the neighborhood.

This annual tradition of random gunpowder assaults on everyone's landscaping ended the year Mr. Boyles brought out the M-80s. Now these are not the M-80s we know of today, which are really just large firecrackers. These M-80s were in fact, legally speaking, dynamite. No one knows where Mr. Boyle's got his munitions, but let's hope al-Qaeda never finds out about it.

As a hush descended on the crowd, Mr. Boyles placed the first M-80, a squat barrel the size of a thumb, in a thick crack in the asphalt. He lit the fuse and, as the warning label recommends, ran like the wind.

Sometimes when I close my eyes I still see an angry red smear where the M-80 burned pure patriotic white into my vision. We knew the thing was going to blow, but I don't think any of us realized what exactly Mr. Boyle's had just unleashed. The shockwave knocked some kids flat on their butts. Dogs from Ohio to Ontario howled. Car alarms across the neighborhood saluted the red white and blue with a symphony of screeching.

Once the ringing in our ears stopped, we all immediately decided, in the spirit of America, that it would be totally awesome to blow one of these up in a bucket of water. And as that fifty-foot spire of water cascaded down on all of us, I think we all felt a little more patriotic.